We want to make the sign up experience for people when they just signed up for Flexi Classes easier. I think once one understands how Flexi works, it is all pretty simple and straight forward, however at the beginning some students seem to struggle as it works a bit different to other systems.
Do you remember what were your challenges when you first had to book your first class? Any suggestions how we could help Flexi Newbies to get into this easier?
Hi, I couldn’t tell which lesson I was signing up for with reference to the overall lesson plan, i.e. which topic number it was inside the course. I had to download the course materials one by one to see the topic number manually.
If the interface could show this information during class selection it would be immensely helpful.
I think this is something I’ve mentioned here before, but what I think would really help is if students were directed to the “my level” section rather than the bit with loads of random classes. As much as you want students to feel they can book lessons at random, in reality it’s much more useful and easy to understand the content if you follow the lessons in a logical order, particularly as a beginner. Maybe as an intermediate-advanced student you might want to just drop in and out of lessons in a different order, particularly for review, but I really don’t understand why Flex Classes tries to encourage this as standard. It seems that Jia Jun also has this confusion, to the point where they are having to download all the resources to see the lesson numbers (@JIA_JUN-Shanghainese-Intro_SH you can see the order of lessons in the “my level” tab in the menu).
PLEASE understand that learners really want to follow lessons in a logical order, we don’t want to take lessons at random - following the lessons in order will really help them make better progress and avoid frustration, thus increasing learner retention too.
Thanks a lot @Katie-Japanese-JP_Intro and @JIA_JUN-Shanghainese-Intro_SH
That’s great feedback.
I think there is a difference in levels for this. For an intermediate or beginner intermediate student probably the lesson order is not that relevant (at least I think so, not sure what other people’s thoughts are). However maybe for the first two levels (Intro 10 topics and A1 40 topics) the order still matters quite a lot.
What we could do is just change the topic names for those first 10+40 topics to include the number within the level. Like
“L5 How old are you”
“L15 Do you use WeChat”
To make the order more obvious for beginner level.
It will however give new students a lot fewer time slots to choose from, which I think might put some people off?
I can relate to what Katie said.
I remember the time I just signed up to use my three free classes, that I just randomly signed up for a review class without having attented the classes to be reviewed. A while later I discovered the “My level” page and everything was so much clearer, so I also think it would help to direct new students to this page at first. As much as I love the flexibility concerning my schedule, as for myself I simply cannot choose on class here, one class there… not sure if it’s OCD but I have to have check marks on all of them, hence try to follow the order as much as I can - in my own pace.
Yeah, I think it would be really helpful to label every lesson with the lesson number, and also (as Stefanie also said) direct people to the “my level” page rather than the confusing “book a class” page. I get that you want to give people more flexibility over timeslots etc, but at the end of the day the most important thing for me at least is to follow the lessons in a logical order.
The problem with timeslots could potentially be resolved by allowing the first student to sign up to pick their preferred timeslot, teacher and topic, which then becomes available on the schedule for other students to join too? Particularly for Japanese where there are just one or two students per class at the moment, most of the scheduled classes aren’t ever booked - I often see classes scheduled classes which would be a very convenient time for me but are the wrong topic, so it would be great to have more flexibility in picking the time and topic before they go on the main schedule.
I love @Katie-Japanese-JP_Intro 's suggestions/comments!
Currently, there is a way to pick at least time and topic by scheduling a 1:1 lesson. However, 1:1s are prohibitively expensive and therefore probably not as attractive for most people. Also, such a class is no longer be a group class that other people could join.
If we were allowed to pick time/topic/teacher, that would eliminate the problem that we have when we’re reaching near the end of each level or chapter - that is running out of classes to take and being forced to either compromise sleep/work/family etc schedules to be able to take the “last class I haven’t taken yet” or waiting for it to show up during a more convenient time next month or so (and hoping it doesn’t get cancelled) while putting study on hold.
I think that by giving students a true flexibility to override the default schedule would result in more scheduled classes. Sounds like a win/win for both students and the school.